Amazon Is Testing a 30-Hour, 75% Salary Workweek (washingtonpost.com)

Amazon is planning a pilot program in which a select group of workers will need to work for 30 hours a week, instead of the usual 40 to 70 hours, and make 75 percent of the salary + benefits (alternate source). From the report:Currently, the pilot program will be small, consisting of a few dozen people. These teams will work on tech products within the human resources division of the company, working Monday through Thursday from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m., with additional flex hours. Their salaries will be lower than 40-hour workers, but they will have the option to transition to full-time if they choose. Team members will be hired from inside and outside the company. As of now, Amazon does not have plans to alter the 40-hour workweek on a companywide level, the spokesman said.

Comments

If they're going to do this...

[CrimsonAvenger]

How about making it 32 hours a week for 80% pay, and have them work Mon-Thu? Four 8-hour workdays a week would be much better than five 6-hour workdays....

Re:If they're going to do this...

[bluefoxlucid]

Interesting (to me): One of the side-effects of my Universal Social Security proposal is excess demand--a labor shortage. The fix is re-defining full-time working hours as 26-32 hours per week, meaning everyone gets dropped to 4-day work weeks. This happens because it's a trillion dollars cheaper than current strategy.

In theory, with or without salary adjustment, dropping everyone's work time by 20% decreases their share of labor pay. That is to say: to make 1,000 things takes 4 people, or it takes 5 people each working 80% as much. As long as your entire economy changes at this ratio and wages don't change relative to each other (they can increase, decrease, or stay the same, but all by the same percentage), whatever salary you end up with is suddenly only capable of buying 80% as much.

In practice, I'm pretty sure we have a lot of part-time workers (I've looked this up before) and a lot of slack time. On one hand, part-time workers would experience no change, so neither their income nor the influence they have on price would change: the stuff they make wouldn't become any more expensive. On the other, many people would work the same amount and spend their work slack-time as leisure-in-earnest instead of non-productive office hours: instead of being restricted by the facade of office hours, you'd be outside work enjoying the time you're spending doing nothing useful.

That's actually a bigger problem. It means cutting hours without a salary cut raises the price of certain goods for part-time workers, but not for office workers; while cutting hours with a salary cut raises the price of certain goods for full-time workers, but not part-timers. The first case is regressive onto the poorer, and benefits the middle-classes; the second is harder on the middle-classes, and doesn't directly-benefit the poor. The second case is arguably better, since cutting working time in this way definitely cuts buying power in total, so someone has to get poorer, and you've restricted how much that happens and to who; but it has obvious undesirable issues.

On the other hand, the end result would probably be about break-even for the middle classes in total (when you include the Universal Social Security benefit), plus a 3-day weekend every week, so ... eh?

Re:I already do this

[Anonymous Coward]

Speaking as a former Amazonian, you are clearly not an Amazonian. That New York Times article was right on the nose. Posting anonymously because I'm pretty sure that my "this severance is contingent on not speaking negatively about the company" contract has already timed out, but they might go after me anyway. Yes, that was a real thing they made me sign. Yes, I sold out, because the alternative is that they'd take a pro-rated chunk of my signing bonus back. My team had a revolving door with a period of 11 months, so I think a lot of other people were in the same boat.

Re:40 hour week is a myth

[Art Challenor]

Since I got as much done as when I worked 60+ hours, no one seemed to care.

All these comments are valid. I suspect that people would get as much done in a solid 30 hours of working than the do in 80 hours of burnout. There was time (70's 80's) where, because of striking coal miners causing power shortages, UK industries were forced to a 3-day work week. IIRC productivity in those 3 days was about 90% of the 5-day week. Whether that would have been sustainable we'll never know because once the strike was settled the week went back to 5 days.

Kellogg had a 30-hour work week in 1930s

[RichPowers]

There's an interesting book called Kellogg's Six Hour Day by Hunnicutt. Here's the synopsis:

"Kellogg's six-hour day was the pinnacle of a hundred-year process that cut working time virtually in half. Kellogg Management, propelled by a vision of Liberation Capitalism, insisted that six hours would revolutionize society by shifting the balance of time from work to leisure--from economic concerns to the challenge of freedom."

The employees grandfathered into the 30-hour week stayed on it until they retired in the 1980s. A 30-hour week gave employees more time for clubs, gardening, sports, family, etc. When you think about how wealthy we are in, say, energetic terms (useful work extracted from an ox vs cubic meter of natural gas), it's amazing how much time and capital we spend on destructive bullshit like sitting in traffic or paying people to do our taxes because the system is too complicated (we're paying a tax on paying taxes ffs). Just unbelievable how needlessly dumb the world is in light of automation, nuclear power, blah, blah, blah.

The ancient Greeks viewed labor as a necessary evil that got in the way of more enlightened pursuits [1]. This is not to say they condoned laziness, but TPS reports, patent lawsuits, and $ModernBullshit are not the highest forms of civilization. Why we focus on metrics like GDP -- which in no way accounts for quality, or whether the "work" should even be done -- is absolutely beyond me. In the end, complex, industrial civilization is still relatively new compared to the species' time on the planet, so we're still trying to figure this out.

[1] = https://www.jstor.org/stable/6...

Re:Kellogg had a 30-hour work week in 1930s

[Beorytis]

A few years later, there was even a bill to establish a 30-hour workweek that made it through Congress: http://www.alternet.org/labor/...